Middle East CrisisGaza Famine Warning Spurs Calls to Remove Restrictions on Food Shipments

The pleas followed the release earlier in the day of a report from a panel of global experts who found that after more than eight months of war between Israel and Hamas, almost half a million Gazans face starvation because of a catastrophic lack of food. They stopped short of saying that a famine had begun.

“The figures in this report are a shameful testament to the failure of world leaders to heed earlier warnings and hold Israel to account for its deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war,” Sally Abi Khalil, the Middle East director for the aid agency Oxfam, said.

Israeli officials have said for months that there is no limit on the amount of food and other aid that can enter Gaza. In recent weeks, Israel has increased the number of commercial vehicles carrying food and other goods across the border.

The U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Tor Wennesland, said in comments to the Security Council on Tuesday, however, that the increase was not enough.

After the release of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification famine report, he echoed longstanding calls from aid and human-rights groups for Israel to open more border crossings into Gaza.

“While it is positive that Israel has opened additional entry points for humanitarian aid, others have been closed,” Mr. Wennesland said. “It is imperative that all necessary access points be opened and made operational,” he said.

The United Nations Security Council took up the findings of the food security experts at a meeting in New York on Tuesday, where diplomats urged action.

The American ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said the report made “alarmingly clear” that humanitarian aid across Gaza must be scaled up and that the “situation is at risk of worsening rapidly.”

Jonathan Miller, Israel’s deputy permanent representative to the U.N., argued that “the problem was and remains in the collection and distribution of this aid by the United Nations,” as well as attacks on aid convoys by Hamas fighters.

Mr. Lazzarini said the challenges were heightened by desperate crowds struggling for limited resources, threats against truck drivers and a lack of protection for aid workers. Speaking in Geneva, he said “we are confronted nowadays with a near total breakdown of law and order.” He also noted that “the number of crossings remains far too limited.”

A U.S. State Department spokesman said the problem was not lack of aid but the breakdown of law and order that made delivery difficult. The spokesman, Matthew Miller, also said that while an American-established pier and airdrops helped, there was “no substitute for the land route” in delivering aid.

But the only “real solution” to the crisis, Mr. Miller said, is to end the fighting, which began in October. “We need to see a cease-fire,” he said.

In their report, the experts said that the amount of food reaching northern Gaza had in fact increased in recent months. Israel, under intense pressure from global governments and aid organizations, has recently opened border crossings for aid there.

Ms. Khalil, the Oxfam official, said that showed what was possible, if Israel were willing to act.

In the south, Mr. Lazzarini said in a post on social media that the hunger situation had significantly deteriorated since Israel began a ground offensive in Rafah in May.

“Much more must be done,” he said.

Anushka Patil contributed reporting.

Mr. Haniyeh, who heads the Hamas political bureau from exile in Qatar, is a longstanding political leader of the group that governs the Gaza Strip and that launched the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defense, said that emergency rescue crews had removed the bodies of Mr. Haniyeh’s sister, her husband and their eight children from their home in the Shati neighborhood in northern Gaza, which was demolished in the strike.

An Israeli airstrike in April killed three of Mr. Haniyeh’s sons and three of his grandchildren while they were traveling in a car in Gaza. The Israeli military confirmed the strike and said the sons were active in Hamas’s military operations.

At the time, Mr. Haniyeh did not specify his sons’ roles in the group but called them martyrs. He said that 60 members of his extended family had been killed by Israel over time.

The analysis by the group, called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or I.P.C., carries considerable weight. The group is a partnership of U.N. bodies and major relief agencies, and global leaders look to it to gauge the severity of hunger crises and allocate humanitarian aid.

After Hamas led a deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Israeli officials declared a siege of Gaza, and they have severely restricted the entry of humanitarian aid, saying they do not want it to help Hamas. From October to early May, the daily number of aid trucks entering the territory through the two main crossing points in southern Gaza dropped by around 75 percent, according to U.N. data, and reports of hunger and malnourishment have been widespread.

Khalil Al-Satri, a 43-year-old graphic designer from Gaza City, said that over the past two months, his family of seven was only able to procure one bag of flour and a few canned goods. “Prices have skyrocketed, making it impossible to buy everything we need,” he said.

Mr. Al-Satri said he worried about the long-term impact that the lack of nutritious food could have on his children. He said that his 5-year-old daughter Mariam has told him that “there is no hunger in heaven,” and becomes upset whenever she sees pictures of food on his phone. Children cannot endure hunger as well as adults, he said, adding, “It’s a difficult and harsh feeling.”

Israeli officials have said for months that there is no limit on the amount of food and other aid that can enter Gaza. In recent weeks, Israel has increased the number of commercial vehicles carrying food and other goods across the border.

While acknowledging the hunger in Gaza, Israeli officials have accused Hamas of stealing or diverting aid. Ismael Thawabteh, deputy head of the Hamas government media office in Gaza, said last month that those allegations were “absolutely false and incorrect.” He added that, while there had been some looting of relief supplies, it had been done by a small number of people who had been forced into desperation by Israel.

Some Gazans have also accused Hamas of benefiting from looted aid.

The I.P.C. report said that almost all of Gaza’s population of around 2.2 million faced high levels of acute food insecurity, and it put Gaza at Phase 4, the “emergency” phase, on its five-level classification scale. But it also said that 495,000 people faced “catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity,” which is Phase 5 on the scale.

“In this phase, households experience an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion of coping capacities,” the report said.

In March, the I.P.C. predicted that famine would likely occur in northern Gaza by the end of May. But on Tuesday, it said that the amount of food and other nutrition delivered there had increased in March and April.

Those increases “appear to have temporarily alleviated conditions” in the north, the report said, adding, “In this context, the available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring.”

Sally Abi Khalil, the Middle East director of Oxfam, an aid agency that contributed to the I.P.C. report, said that the slight improvement in conditions in northern Gaza showed that Israel had the ability to end the hunger crisis.

“The figures in this report are a shameful testament to the failure of world leaders to heed earlier warnings and hold Israel to account for its deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war,” Ms. Abi Khalil said.

In early May, Israel’s military sent ground troops into the southern Gazan city of Rafah, and more than a million people, many of whom had previously been displaced from their homes, fled to a coastal area that lacks basic infrastructure, making them acutely vulnerable.

The military operation closed the Rafah border crossing from Egypt and disrupted aid deliveries at the Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel. The situation in the south has since deteriorated, the report said.

The United Nations and aid groups have said that Gaza’s hunger crisis is man-made. Most incidents of severe and widespread hunger occur in parts of the world inaccessible to aid where the population has been weakened by years of drought. Aid groups say that there was relatively little malnutrition in Gaza before Oct. 7.

The arm of the Israeli military that implements government policy in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, known as COGAT, said on Tuesday that “more and more aid is entering Gaza,” a position at odds with that of Israel’s allies, who have for months pressed the country to scale up assistance.

“We continue to press Israel to create better conditions for facilitating aid delivery inside Gaza,” said Linda Thomas-Greenfield is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She also said that it was “unacceptable” that Israel’s system for aid groups to notify it of their locations — a system known as deconfliction — remained ineffective.

On Monday, President Emmanuel Macron of France and King Abdullah II of Jordan, called for all restrictions at the crossing points into Gaza to be lifted.

The I.P.C. said that to be able to buy food, more than half of households in Gaza “had to exchange their clothes for money, and one-third resorted to picking up trash to sell.” It added that more than half of households often did not have any food to eat and that more than 20 percent went full days and nights without eating.

The I.P.C. identifies a famine when at least 20 percent of households in an area face an extreme lack of food, at least 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition and at least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people die each day from starvation or disease linked to malnutrition. Since the I.P.C. was established in 2004, its approach has been used to identify only two famines: in Somalia in 2011, and in South Sudan in 2017.

After the group’s warning in March that Gaza was at risk of imminent famine, South Africa asked the U.N.’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, to issue emergency orders for Israel to stop what it called the “genocidal starvation” of the Palestinian people. The request was part of South Africa’s broader case that accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza, a charge that Israel rejects.

A month ago, the court, which is based in The Hague, ordered Israel to “immediately” halt its military offensive in Rafah, and it emphasized the need for open land crossings as part of its request for “the unhindered provision” of humanitarian aid. The Rafah offensive continues, but the order increased global pressure on Israel to scale back its attacks and limit civilian casualties.

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.

Since Mr. Gallant’s last visit to Washington, the United States has helped defend Israel against an “unprecedented” Iranian attack in April, President Biden signed legislation with more than $14 billion in assistance for Israel, and the United States helped to open new routes to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, including constructing a temporary pier for aid delivery off the coast of Gaza, Mr. Austin said.

Mr. Austin also noted that Israel still faces a “very real and very dangerous threat from Iran” and “from its terrorist partners and proxies” including Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas. “The United States will always support Israel’s right to defend itself, and the United States will always ensure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself,” Mr. Austin said.

But Mr. Austin also stressed that “another war between Israel and Hezbollah could easily become a regional war with terrible consequences for the Middle East, and so diplomacy is by far the best way to prevent more escalation.”

Mr. Gallant, in his opening remarks, called Iran “the greatest threat to the future of the world and the future of our region,” and warned that “time is running out” to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Mr. Gallant also did not rule out the possibility of escalating conflict at Israel’s norther border with Lebanon, following weeks of intensifying hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel. “We are working closely together to achieve an agreement, but we must also discuss readiness for every possible scenario,” Mr. Gallant said.

Mr. Gallant met with Mr. Austin on his third day of talks with senior Biden administration officials. Days before, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared that the intensive phase of fighting in Gaza was nearing an end and indicated that Israel was preparing to turn its focus to the threat from Hezbollah. The United States is seeking to prevent those tensions along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon from becoming another full-fledged war.

Mr. Gallant met with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in Washington on Monday, and they discussed stalled cease-fire negotiations with Hamas, next steps for governance and security in Gaza, and the importance of those efforts to Israel’s security, a state department spokesman said. Mr. Blinken also emphasized the importance of keeping the conflict with Hezbollah from escalating further.

The Israeli defense minister began his meetings in Washington on Sunday, sitting down with Amos Hochstein, a Biden adviser who has overseen previous talks between Israel and Lebanon. A week earlier Mr. Hochstein met with Mr. Netanyahu in Jerusalem and with Lebanese officials in Beirut, as the Israeli military warned that Hezbollah’s cross-border strikes against Israel risked a wider confrontation.

On Monday, Mr. Gallant also met with William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director. On Wednesday, he is scheduled to meet with President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.

So how is famine defined? Here’s a closer look.

What is a famine?

Food insecurity experts working on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or I.P.C., an initiative controlled by U.N. bodies and major relief agencies, identify a famine in an area on the basis of three conditions:

• At least 20 percent of households face an extreme lack of food.

• At least 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition.

• At least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people die each day from starvation or disease linked to malnutrition.

Since the I.P.C. was developed in 2004, it has been used to identify only two famines: in Somalia in 2011, and in South Sudan in 2017. In Somalia, more than 100,000 people died before famine was officially declared.

I.P.C. analysts expressed grave concern about food insecurity in Yemen and Ethiopia related to the civil wars in those countries, but said not enough information was available from governments to issue a formal assessment.

The classifications of famine in Somalia and South Sudan galvanized global action and spurred large donations.

What has the I.P.C. said about hunger in Gaza?

The first I.P.C. report on Gaza, released in December, found that the enclave’s entire population was experiencing food insecurity at crisis or worse levels. Though the group said Gaza had not yet crossed the famine threshold, it warned that the risk of famine-level hunger would increase if the war did not stop.

A second analysis in March projected that famine was “imminent” for the 300,000 Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza, and that such conditions would develop by the end of May.

The group’s analysis on Tuesday said almost half a million people in Gaza face starvation because of a catastrophic lack of food. It said aid deliveries had improved the situation in the north, but that Israel’s ground operations in the south had disrupted aid distribution there.

What are the complications in declaring a famine?

The December I.P.C. analysis relied on publicly available data from international and local aid groups in Gaza that the group said met its methodology standards. But I.P.C. analysts said they lacked recent data on the prevalence of acute malnutrition. Getting that data is very difficult in a war zone and poses a burden on already overwhelmed health care workers, the group added.

The organization’s criteria were originally designed to address weather-related famine, not wartime crises like the one in Gaza. But most severe hunger crises in recent history have been driven by conflict rather than weather.

And while I.P.C. experts perform the analysis that can classify a famine, it is up to government authorities and the United Nations to formally declare one.

In some cases, countries have hesitated to do so. In 2022, Somalia’s president expressed reluctance to declare a famine during a severe hunger crisis brought on by a drought. And in 2021, Ethiopia blocked a classification of famine in the Tigray region through heavy lobbying, according to a top U.N. official.

It is unclear exactly what authority could declare a famine in Gaza. The I.P.C. group said the process typically involves the government in a country and its top U.N. official. Determining who that authority would be in Gaza was beyond the organization’s scope, it said.

In a country where military service is compulsory for most Jewish Israelis, both men and women, the exemption for the ultra-Orthodox has long prompted resentment. But anger over the group’s special treatment has grown as the war in Gaza has stretched into its ninth month, requiring tens of thousands of reservists to serve multiple tours and costing the lives of hundreds of soldiers.

“These days, in the midst of a difficult war, the burden of that inequality is more acute than ever — and requires the advancement of a sustainable solution to this issue,” the Supreme Court said in its ruling.

The decision threatened to widen one of the most painful divisions in Israeli society, pitting secular Jews against the ultra-Orthodox, who say their religious study is as essential and protective as the military. It also exposed the fault lines in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, which depends on the support of two ultra-Orthodox parties that oppose their constituents’ conscription, even as other Israelis are killed and wounded in Gaza.

Israeli courts have ruled against the exemption before, including Supreme Court decisions in 1998, 2012 and 2017. The top court has repeatedly warned the government that to continue the policy, it must be written into law — though that law would be subject to constitutional challenges, as previous ones were — while also giving the government time to hammer out legislation.

But for seven years, since the last law was struck down, successive Israeli governments have dragged their feet in drafting new legislation. In 2023, the law finally reached its expiration date, leading the Israeli government to order the military simply not to draft the ultra-Orthodox while lawmakers worked on an exemption.

On Tuesday, the court indicated that its patience had finally run out, striking down that order as illegal. It did not set a timeline for when the military must start conscripting tens of thousands of draft-age religious students. Such a move would likely prove a massive logistical and political challenge, as well as be met with mass resistance by the ultra-Orthodox community.

Gali Baharav-Miara, Israel’s attorney general, in a letter to government officials on Tuesday, said the military had committed to draft at least 3,000 ultra-Orthodox religious students — out of more than 60,000 of draft age — during the coming year. The letter noted that the number would come nowhere near to bridging the gap in military service between the ultra-Orthodox community and other Israeli Jews.

Instead, the ruling included a means of pressuring the ultra-Orthodox to accept the court’s judgment: the suspension of millions of dollars in government subsidies given to religious schools, or yeshivas, that previously supported the exempted students, striking a blow to revered institutions at the heart of the ultra-Orthodox community.

The court’s ruling threatens Mr. Netanyahu’s fragile wartime coalition, which includes secular members who oppose the exemption and ultra-Orthodox parties that support it. Either group breaking ranks could cause the government to collapse and call new elections, at a time when popular support for the government is at a low. The opposition in the Israeli Parliament largely wants to end the exemption.

The Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7 — which ignited the eight-month war in Gaza — somewhat loosened the ultra-Orthodox stance on the draft, with some leaders saying that those who could not study scripture should go to the military.

“Still, the maximum that the ultra-Orthodox community is willing to give is far less than what the general Israeli public is willing to accept,” said Israel Cohen, a commentator for Kol Barama, an ultra-Orthodox radio station.

But the ultra-Orthodox parties, with few palatable options, might not be eager to bring down Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, he said. “They don’t see an alternative, so they’ll try to make it work for as long as they can,” said Mr. Cohen. “They will compromise more than they might have been willing to a year ago in an attempt to preserve the government.”

For now, the military must devise a plan to potentially welcome to its ranks thousands of soldiers who are opposed to serving and whose insularity and traditions are at odds with a modern fighting force.

The court’s decision creates a “gaping political wound in the heart of the coalition” that Mr. Netanyahu now must urgently address, said Yohanan Plesner, chairman of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank.

In a statement, Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party criticized the Supreme Court for issuing a ruling when the government was planning to pass legislation that would render the case obsolete. The government’s proposed law, the party said, would increase the number of ultra-Orthodox conscripts while recognizing the importance of religious study.

It was unclear whether Mr. Netanyahu’s proposal would ultimately hold up to judicial scrutiny. But if passed by Parliament, a new law could face years of court challenges, buying the government additional time, said Mr. Plesner.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Tuesday immediately sparked outrage among ultra-Orthodox politicians. Many ultra-Orthodox view military service as a gateway to assimilation into a secular Israeli society that would lead young people to deviate from a lifestyle guided by the Torah, the Jewish scriptures.

“The State of Israel was established in order to be a home for the Jewish people, for whom Torah is the bedrock of their existence. The Holy Torah will prevail,” Yitzhak Goldknopf, an ultra-Orthodox government minister, said in a statement on Monday.

After the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, Israelis united in determination to strike back. But as thousands of reserve soldiers were asked to serve second and third tours in Gaza, the fault lines in Israeli society quickly resurfaced.

Some Israeli analysts warn that war could spread to additional fronts in the West Bank and the northern border with Lebanon, leading the government to call for more conscripts and further straining relations between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Already many Israelis — secular, religious and ultra-Orthodox alike — see the draft issue as just one skirmish in a broader cultural battle over the country’s increasingly uncertain future.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews have been exempt from military service since the founding of Israel in 1948, when the country’s leadership promised them autonomy in exchange for their support in creating a largely secular state. At the time, there were only a few hundred yeshiva students.

The ultra-Orthodox have grown to more than a million people, roughly 13 percent of Israel’s population. They wield considerable political clout and their elected leaders became kingmakers, featuring in most Israeli coalition governments.

But as ultra-Orthodox power grew, so did anger over their failure to join the military and their relatively small contribution to the economy. In 2019, Avigdor Lieberman, a former ally of Mr. Netanyahu, rebuffed his offer to join a coalition that would legislate the draft exemption for the ultra-Orthodox. The decision helped send Israel to repeated elections — five in four years.

Last year, after Mr. Netanyahu returned to power at the helm of his current coalition, he sought to legislate a plan to weaken the country’s judiciary, setting off mass protests. For the ultra-Orthodox, who backed the judicial overhaul, a major motivation was ensuring that the Supreme Court could no longer impede their ability to avoid the draft.

Ron Scherf, a lieutenant colonel in the Israeli reserves, said many soldiers were frustrated to be serving multiple tours of duty during the war, even as ultra-Orthodox Israelis are “never called up in the first place.”

An activist with Brothers in Arms, a collection of reserve soldiers who oppose Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Scherf asked, “How can Israel just allow an entire community to be exempt from its civic duties?”

Gabby Sobelman, Johnatan Reiss and Myra Noveck contributed reporting.